If you’re the kind of person that wants to know what their market is talking about on Twitter then this quick tip might interest you!

I see many articles talking about so many tools that can track keywords on Twitter and send you e-mails with the specified tweets but I’m the kind that wants to keep it simple. I don’t like to use many tools: I already have to use many tools in order to provide my SEO services and I just want to limit it.

So, here is a quick tip to stay in touch with your market on Twitter. Go on search.twitter.com and search for the keywords you’re interested in. Then, on the right side of the screen you’ll see a link called “Feed to this query”.

Right click it and Copy Link Location. Then, log in into your Google Reader account and add a subscription with that feed. As a good practice create a Folder in Google Reader called Twitter and place your Twitter feeds there. This way you don’t have to think about which tool did you used, or to receive to many e-mails.

What you think of it? Share your ideas in comments bellow!

If you go into a bar and try to sell SEO services how do you think people will react? If you go in a park and stop people that jog to present your product how do you think they’ll react? If you see a group of people sharing stories about their latest vacation and you interrupt them to promote your service/product how do you think they’ll react?

These kinds of actions based on interruption are the worst things you could do on any social network. You may think that since so many people use social networks for business it’s natural to expect a direct sell interruption. Wrong! Indeed many people use social networks for business but the word social makes all the difference.

The idea is to interact, build relations, let people know what you do by using your bio. When they go out to scout for new clients people are interacting first and present a business card later. When a person enters a company office or visits a business blog, there is the place where they expect to see direct sale.

You don’t have to tell people what you do. They can read your bio, visit your blog, see what you tweet or post on Facebook or what kind of videos you create. The only thing you have to do is think about how to establish a connection. How to gain their trust? How to build authority around you? How to brand yourself?

More and more people are using Twitter only as a broadcasting tool. Many of my followers are spammers, bots or people that use automated tools to build followers. The problem is that you may think you have an audience when in fact you’re talking only to a handful of people.

Now, with this feature of creating lists I think many of the problems will be solved. People will create lists with users that they trust, with people that tweet in a constant way, with people that add some kind of value. So, you’ll benefit from other people’s knowledge about other Twitter users. I think this is a big step for Twitter and a way to filter the spam.

Definition: a broadcaster on Twitter is a person that is not interested in engaging with others or build relations or communicate

The odd thing is that many times the tweets contain useful tips and suggestions or useful links. So, why this can be a problem? Because it lacks interaction. You see, there are many broadcasters on Twitter. That is why you see every day hundreds of tweets about the same article, in the same form: title of article plus a link to it. There is no value on that.

We never do this in real life. We never recommend a book or a movie like that. We always express an opinion. And this is what I think is missing from Twitter right now. Look at Chris Brogan. Every tweet he puts on is an invitation to engagement and communication. We should learn from that.

I think that this is the real meaning of the phrase: “add value to your network”. When we talk about Twitter that phrase can easily say: express a quality opinion on an article – don’t just tweet it. What does this mean? If you express an opinion it means you care about your friends and you have the ability to make your own judgement. Many people are afraid to say that they don’t like an article. Many people tweet links to articles that I bet they didn’t even read.

Let me know what you think about all this. I think we can improve Twitter by what I said above.

The idea for this article came to me when I launched my new blog. I thought that if I would ask some of my friends from Twitter to tweet something about my blog I would get some really good traffic. I don’t have to say it, because you probably guess: nothing extraordinary happen. Why?

I think that a series of events offered me the chance to understand that the social world of the Internet is no different than the real one. I realize that there are different ways to leverage yourself but in the end it’s all about influence. In that moment I realized that it doesn’t matter how many followers you have on Twitter.

Many users think of the number of followers as some sort of currency: the more you have the more power you have. Well, I think it’s true – in some aspects. What they don’t realize is that many of them are not holding the right currency. Just like in real life there is the mighty dollar and the euro or the English pound and then there are many others with less influence.
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Your social media activity should help you, not damage your business. You should try to maximize the benefits. The Internet has shifted from a medium based on just browsing to a medium based on interaction. Websites are not business cards or catalogs – we are talking about a new office.

Social media is the new way of marketing. I think that every person or business that tries to benefit from his social media activity should consider some basic things. And one of them is to have a consistent image along all his social media accounts. And another thing is to have a decent image.

I think the avatar is extremely important in social media. The reason is because social media is about people interacting. And people like to talk to people. In real life I don’t see anyone talking to a dollar sign or a chart or some mountains – unless you are crazy.

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First you need a business. It may sound strange but many people start a blog with the intention to make some money without having a business model. Many don’t even have a product or service to sell. That is why their actions are random. The focus is missing. The simple existence of a product and/or service will force the business owner to do some thinking.

It’s not easy to do business online. It takes time and determination and above all a plan. You have to think to strategy, tactics, goals, ways to achieve it, ways to measure your success and ways to adjust your actions. You can’t do all these without a solid business model and a product/service to sell.

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You, as a human, know very well that everything you do in real life is what defines you as a person: the way you dress, the way you speak, the things you read (or the things you don’t read), how is your house (clean, dirty, organized), what kind of friends you have, what movies you watch, what music you prefer and the list could go on. If you ask a kid on the street he knows that depending on what he does people will see him differently. Even a kid knows this stuff.

Then, why grown up people don’t realize this when going online. And I think that there is a place where this kind of things are most obvious: Twitter. It must be because of the way Twitter is build: because of the way you interact with your friends/followers. The possibility to interact almost in real-time with people around the globe makes us loose the sight of our goals sometimes. Now, I don’t want to get me wrong here: I’m not saying that you have to be a robot and tweet only technical stuff or your-niche-market-related-stuff. But I’m suggesting the fact that to much of side-talking or not-relevant-to-your-profile-tweeting can affect your presence on Twitter.

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You know Twitter, the new boom on social media channels. I recently wrote an article about how you can socialize on Twitter by re-tweeting relevant and interesting tweets from the people you follow. Now, I want to talk about another aspect: where are the people that tweet about the same things as you?

Many people like to go on Twitter, watch what others are tweeting, click the links, tweet something and that’s it. To many people just wait to see if someone is going to follow them. The truth is that this method of attracting followers it’s not that productive.

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Everybody heard about Twitter, many of you probably have Twitter accounts and you are tweeting about what you read, what you do, what videos are you watching, news and so on. There are so many videos and articles out there that teach you how to get more followers or how to make money with Twitter. I’m more interested in how you can interact with your followers.

The idea to have lots of followers and no interaction is silly. It’s easy to increase the number of your followers. Search for the people that tweet about things that interest you and follow them. At least 70% will follow you back, especially if you also tweet about the same things.

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